Landwey, a real estate investment company owned by overnight billionaire Wale Ayilara, has made its second attempt in three weeks to take FIJ’s website down through the back door. This time, it ended in failure.

Like the first, the latest move is because of FIJ’s April 2022 story on how Landwey collected N5 million and N37 million from a UAE-based Nigeria three weeks apart in June 2020, with a promise that his property would be ready in November. Landwey defaulted, initially defending the delay and repeatedly asking him for patience, but by 2021, they had stopped taking his calls, prompting the person to reach out to FIJ for help.

FIJ’s website first went down at about 8pm WAT on Thursday February 23, 2023, following a suspension of our hosting by cloud service providers, DigitalOcean.

THE FALSE ALERT

We reached out to our web consultancy, only to be told they had missed two emails from DigitalOcean accusing us of copyright infringements. As we would find out, the problem was not that the emails were missed; DigitalOcean did not conduct any investigation, which a basic tool like the Wayback Machine would have done for them. DigitalOcean did not even ask us to prove our ownership of the story. They had just one instruction: take the story down!

The first email, dated February 16 and signed by the Security Operations Centre of DigitalOcean, said FIJ’s story on Landwey’s failure to fulfill its obligations to a client “was the subject of a notification of claimed copyright infringement pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)”.

The second email from DigitalOcean, dated February 22, gave us an extra 24 hours to pull the story down. When we didn’t, DigitalOcean simply pulled our entire website down!

Someone claiming to be ‘Luis Felipe Colina’, all the way from Venezuela, had sworn under penalty of perjury that he had detected infringements of his copyright interests by FIJ.

He claimed that FIJ’s piece of April 2, 2022, titled ’21 Months After Taking N42m, Wale Ayilara’s Landwey Fails to Give UAE-Based Nigerian His Property’, was orginally his. Colina claimed to have first published the piece in a private newsletter he circulated on April 1.

“I have reasonable good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of in the report below is not authorized by myself, my agents, or the law,” he wrote.

“Therefore, this letter is an official notification to effect removal of the detected infringement listed in the report below. The report below specifies the exact location of the infringement.

“I hereby request that you immediately remove or block access to the
infringing material, as specified under Section 512(c) of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (the “Act”). Please insure the user refrains from using or sharing with others the unauthorized materials in the future.”

But all that was a ruse. FIJ is in possession of evidence showing the email is the handiwork of an international PR firm employed by Ayilara to cleanse his digital footprints of negative comments.

RINSE AND REPEAT — THE SAME STRATEGY

From DigitalOcean, FIJ migrated to Cloudfare, which Colina wrote again to falsely claim another copyright violation. On March 2, Colina wrote Cloudflare with the claim that the disputed April 2020 news report and FIJ’s June 5 2022 piece on the massacre of innocent worshippers at Saint Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, were his original reports but were plagiarised by FIJ.

The inclusion of the second piece, FIJ understands, is to deflect attention from Landwey, since it is clear that Landwey alone can be the only interested party with such interest as to want the first story off the internet. What both Landwey and Colina are not aware of, however, is that FIJ is in possession of the raw audio interview from which the Catholic Church story was written.

READ MORE: ‘They Shot at Adults, Kids Without Saying a Word’, Reveals Catholic Church Massacre Survivor

SAME LOOPHOLES

There is no way a Vezenuelan who isn’t a journalist has any business reporting a Nigerian real estate company that took N42 million from a client without delivering the property, or interviewing a Nigerian witness to the Catholic church massacre.

Colina’s newsletter is again cooked up. There’s no other piece on that newsletter, and its ‘subscribe’ icon is unresponsive. It is impossible for anyone to subscribe to getting Colina’s past or future newsletters — because they simply do not exist.

Three, https://iberonewsltd.com, the website on which the newsletter was supposedly hosted, does not exist. Any attempt to reach that website will only yield the following: “404. Not Found. The resource requested could not be found on this server!”

CLOUDFLARE’S VOICE OF REASON

Unlike DigitalOcean, which blocklisted FIJ and insisted not to host us again despite our best explanations, Cloudflare conducted its investigation and concluded that Colina had not provided adequate information to back his claims up.

“Hello There!” read their email, signed by Usama Sharfi.

“I hope this finds you well. Upstream provider has closed this case for now due to insufficient details provided by reporter. So you can consider this ticket solved for now. We’ll reach you out via new ticket if any further assistance would be required. Thanks!”